GROVE CITY, Pa. - Unless it's raining, we're not usually thinking about the actual dirt that baseball players are standing on. 

Maybe we should. Because in more than half the Major League Baseball Parks out there, that dirt came from a company in Grove City.

Grant McKnight is the founder and president of DuraEdge Products Inc. He is also a huge baseball fan, although he watches the game a little differently than most of us.

"My kids tell me I only watch the field, I don't actually watch the game," said McKnight.

To be fair, that's where his focus has been for more than a decade because before the dirt ever gets to a big league diamond it starts right here at McKnight's facility just outside of Slippery Rock. 

21 Major League parks use DuraEdge products. But the story behind how that all happened actually started with his dad's sand and gravel business.

"I learned in that business the intricate mix designs of making asphalt and concrete and really trying to improve those commodity building products," said McKnight.

That's important, because he took that way of thinking and applied it to sports, first with golf greens and then baseball diamonds.

But way before any of those major league parks even became a possibility, he had to get his foot in the door somewhere. Turned out, this would be the place; Slippery Rock University, the first field installed by DuraEdge and everything just kind of snowballed from there.

"I didn't really think much of it when it was first put down. I was glad to do the project. I was born and raised in Slippery Rock," said McKnight. "It was just kind of fun to be involved in something unique like that. Every year somebody would call and say, I'd like to have more of this surface."

By 2005, those calls were coming from professional teams. It turned out, no one had really put much soil science into the process before DuraEdge came along.

"They were all different. They seemed to be all different. So then we started doing testing on them. We started looking and then it became evident they were all very, very, very different. They were all performing in different climates, different ways," McKnight said.

So McKnight started working with big league groundskeepers. They needed a surface that could handle the rain, offer what he calls "true ball bounce," and also stand up to the non-baseball events.

He tweaked the ratio of sand, silt, and clay, then in 2005 made it into his first major league park with the Phillies.

Today, his list of customers has grown so much, he has 10 facilities open across the U.S. with more on the way, but the foundation for all of them starts right here.

"I wanted to be the first person in the country to produce the exact same product in multiple locations," said McKnight. "We mine the clay product, the base clay product here locally in western Pennsylvania. It gets processed and milled into a powder, and from that point we ship that raw material out via barge, truck, and rail to our locations."

From the ground in western Pennsylvania to a true baseball movement in parks across the country.

"We've been able to make a change, a positive change, and that's ultimately what's happened," said McKnight. "The relative level of expectation of how an infield plays in professional baseball, you can call any groundskeeper and ask them. It has changed. The players are demanding something different."

And they're getting it from right here in western Pennsylvania.